Revolution not evolution

It was titled “Revolution not Evolution”. It called for a step change in the way government interacts with users online.

It’s only 11 pages long, so go read it if you can.

Do four things

Martha’s report called for us to do 4 things: create GDS, fix publishing, fix transactions and build it all properly

We’ve created GDS. There are just over 200 people in Central London including developers, designers, user research, analysis and content designers. People with specialist skills working to deliver this transformation.

Fixing publishing

We’ve been working on fixing Publishing.

There were around 2000 government websites.

In October 2011 we launched GOV.UK. It’s the home for government services and information.

By March this year it had also became the home to 24 central government departments.

And over the next few months it’ll also become the home to 300ish government agencies.

Fixing transactions

Our main focus now though is fixing transactions.

GDS has people all over the country working with departments to transform transactions.

For example we have people working with the Office for Public Guardian in Birmingham on the Lasting power of attorney service. The team has been transforming a transaction that was mostly paper based into a digital service. We launched a public beta of this on Tuesday.

There is a team working with Defra (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) and the Rural Payments Agency in Reading on transforming the farm payments service using digital mapping.

We also have a team in Swansea at the DVLA (Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency) on digitising the driving licence and vehicle log book

The twenty-five

We actually have people out working with 8 departments and 14 agencies on 25 government services.

The standard

This standard contains 26 criteria that new (or redesigned) services will be assessed against before they go live.

When you are building a service you need to consider and understand the needs of the user.

In order to build and run the service you need a multidisciplinary team of developers, designers, content designers, web ops etc.

You need to take those user needs and build a prototype. Then get feedback by testing it, iterate the prototype based on the feedback, then test it again.

You need to be able to deploy changes regularly if you are going to react to feedback. Lots of government services only have a 6 or 12 month release cycle. That just isn’t good enough. You need the capability to release changes on a regular basis. As an example of this, GOV.UK has made over 1000 software releases in just six months.

You need to be open about what you are doing.

There are 26 points in total that services will be tested against. They apply to all new or redesigned services with over 100,000 transactions per year.

April 2014

We’re starting the assessments now, but the Digital by Default Service Standard comes into force from April 2014.

Services must pass the assessment or they can’t go live.

The manual

Now, that is going to be quite a big change and it’s a lot to take in. Also, GDS can’t do everything – there just aren’t enough of us.

So we’ve put together the Government Service Design Manual. It contains lots of guides and advice on how to design, build and operate Digital by Default services.